IT’S official. A solid majority of New Yorkers really, really doesn’t like Hillary Rodham Clinton. Right now, the Easter Bunny could be competitive with Hillary Clinton if it were the only available alternative to the first lady.

Yes, Rick Lazio had a very, very good first week as the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. But the fact that he is now tied with Hillary Rodham Clinton testifies not so much to his skills as to her glaring weaknesses.

Some 56 percent of New Yorkers have made it clear they do not want to vote for Mrs. Clinton, whether the candidate opposing her is named Giuliani or Lazio. You might call this group a broad-based coalition of dislike.

Republicans and conservatives don’t like her for the simple reason that she is a liberal Democrat. But it also appears that women – especially married white women like Hillary herself – find her unappealing. As do suburban voters. As do upstate voters.

The reason she was so aggressively recruited by Rep. Charles Rangel and others to run for the seat being vacated by Pat Moynihan was that they believed she could do better with these kinds of voters. They pursued this unconventional electoral avenue because it appeared that nobody in the state could beat Rudy Giuliani.

It looks like they outsmarted themselves.

Flash back to January 1999, just before the police shooting of Amadou Diallo. Pat Moynihan announced his decision to retire from the Senate at the conclusion of his term. Rudy Giuliani was at the height of his popularity, with an approval rating in the city above 60 percent, 14 months after receiving nearly 58 percent of the vote in his re-election bid.

According to conventional wisdom, if a Republican candidate in a statewide race can get 40 percent of the vote in the city, he wins because of the number of GOP voters in the suburbs and upstate. And in private polling, Giuliani led possible Democratic Senate candidates like Rep. Nita Lowey and Comptroller H. Carl McCall by as much as 2 to 1.

So, even though Rudy was mayor of New York and mayors have had real trouble winning statewide races in the past half-century, it looked like the Moynihan seat was his for the taking.

And then Hillary’s name started floating around. This was, you’ll remember, around the time that the House of Representatives voted to impeach Bill Clinton – a wildly unpopular act in New York state, where polls showed nearly 80 percent in opposition to impeachment.

The perversity of the moment was such that the president’s disgrace seemed like a political asset in New York state – something that might be successfully exploited.

The Hillary candidacy was, in other words, a hail-Mary play born of desperate circumstances. The idea of a Hillary candidacy at first seemed gimmicky and absurd to most political professionals, in part because such a thing had never been contemplated before. A first lady running for Senate? And from a state in which she had never lived?

But in January 1999, John Zogby took a poll and discovered that in a head-to-head matchup, Hillary led Rudy by 11 points.

That poll was followed by others taken during the furor that gripped the city for two months following the Diallo shooting, all showing the same kind of lead for Mrs. Clinton. Those numbers certainly convinced Hillary that she had a good chance of beating Rudy – and by summer, she was off on her listening tour.

By now, she’s basically been running for Senate for more than a year. She’s improved as a candidate, but the natural advantages that she brought with her to the race – like the impeachment-sympathy factor – are long gone. And the insulting notion that women would support her simply because she was a famous (and wronged) woman has happily been proved false.

Still, she and the Clinton attack machine will figure out ways to injure Lazio, and he is going to go through some tough times between now and November.

But no matter what she does to him, the key question for Mrs. Clinton is: How can she convince those voters who seem determined not to vote for her under any circumstances to change their minds?

I can’t think of any. More important, it appears that she can’t, either.